What Really Happened on Vitalis

For those not familiar, Vitalis is a world I created in a futuristic science fiction series. It starts out with a crew on a space transport that have a run in with some inter-stellar salvage experts (read: pirates, matey). Things don’t go so well for any of them and the long and short of it is a new world is discovered outside of the Terran Coalition of Systems (aka known space). Sounds pretty cool, right?

I thought so to, and I released them one part after another. The average length was 20,000 words to 30,000 words and I priced them dirt cheap at $.99. Seven parts in all and sales skyrocketed earlier this year. I had a couple of months with over 5,000 sales for the series and people emailed me and tweeted me and Facebooked me to tell me they love them. Life was good!

Then a handful of people took it upon themselves to get upset with the length of the books. They spent $.99 for something hey liked – something they admit sucked them in – and they were pissed off about it. So they wrote essentially the same review on each book and gave them all a rating of 1. This sunk the series practically overnight. The positive feedback to me was great, but since it wasn’t placed on Amazon on the books themselves, it didn’t do any good. Instead the haters down-rated the stories into the abyss. The lower the rating the less interest Amazon’s algorithms have in it – and the less it’s shown to potential buyers. Thus you see the power of reviews and the power of readers.

All those blog posts and other times when I’ve told people how important reviews are to authors like me? Yeah, I meant it. This entire series and a substantial portion of my financial ability to write new stuff has been sabotaged. It had nothing to do with greed on my part, it had to do with getting new stories in people’s hands as quickly as possible. The pricing of $.99 each was actually detrimental to me, rather than a pricing scheme. And the Vitalis Omnibus, which contains all 7 of the stories is longer than the vast majority of published novels out there and half the price – so no, I’m not trying to screw anybody over financially. As a matter of fact, I kind of feel like the exact opposite has happened because of this.

Whining aside, I’ve taken Vitalis parts 2 – 7 off sale. Yep, they aren’t out there anymore. I left New Beginnings up because it’s free and how can you bitch about free? My desire is for people to check it out and enjoy it as a sample of what’s in the Vitalis Omnibus, then they can go and buy that. Sometime next month I plan to release Vitalis: Resurrection, the novel in the Vitalis series. For the record I said novel, not novella, not novelette, and not short story.

My friends and loyal readers, I thank you all for the support an for continuing to read my books. I also beseech you to remember my story when you read a book (no matter who the author is) and please leave a review and a positive rating. Who knows, you might just be helping them make sure their kids can get into college.

To learn more about Jason Halstead, visit his website to learn about him, his books, sign up for his newsletter, or check out some free samples of his books at http://www.booksbyjason.com.